


the amazing spider-woman

by malikjaureguis



Category: Fifth Harmony (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, F/F, Spider-Man!Camila, im not good with tags but it's exactly how it sounds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-17
Updated: 2015-01-17
Packaged: 2018-03-07 23:56:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3188066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malikjaureguis/pseuds/malikjaureguis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Camila knows she’d make a pretty shit superhero, but she doesn’t think she’ll ever have to worry about that. Fucking surprise. — Spider-Man AU</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've been wanting this AU for awhile and it's never been written by anyone else that I can find, so I wrote it myself. I've been writing it for a few months too, leaving it alone and coming back to it, and I decided to start posting it. In chapters, of course (originally it was going to be a one-shot). I hope you guys enjoy this and let me know if you want to read more of it and if you like it, and I'd love you to tell others who might want to read about it. Thank you!

If anyone had asked Camila if she wanted to be a superhero, she probably would’ve sputtered for a few seconds before emphatically nodding and then rambling on about all the kittens she’d save out of trees if she could fly.

However, if she’s being honest, she knows she’d make a pretty shit superhero.  She’d most likely just end up with a superhuman ability to run into things, or at least her super speed would send her careening into buildings, super strength would result in her dropping a giant truck on somebody, and she can barely walk so imagining flying is a bit frightening.  This is something she’s thought about probably more often than she should, as Normani and Dinah are quick to point out during sleepovers in one or the other’s bedroom at two o’clock in the morning, when the lack of sleep is starting to affect otherwise average conversations.

She thinks about this during a school field trip, when her class is walking through a college lab filled with boiling beakers and scientists scrambling around.  It’s a science field trip, obviously, and Camila is predictably bored out of her skull.  She, Dinah, and Normani trail in the back of the herd of students as their teacher and one of the lab’s employees lead the tour; Dinah keeps making off-putting jokes about the attractiveness of their tour guide that results in Normani giggling and Camila smacking her on the elbow as the red patches in her face start to glow bright.

“CheeChee, stop that!” Camila says in her mock accent, flickering her gaze between her scandalous friend and the tour guide, who honestly wouldn’t be able to hear Dinah unless he had supersonic hearing, but that doesn’t stop Camila’s cheeks from heating up exponentially.  Dinah merely dons her evil smirk, and Normani’s snickers are not helping to discourage her.  “He might hear you!”

“Ever think that’s the point, Chancho?”  Dinah winks, and Camila imitates a gagging motion with her finger in her mouth.

“He’s, like, forty.” she says (even though he’s probably only thirty to thirty-five), and Dinah wiggles her eyebrows.

“Can you say sugar daddy, then?”  Camila’s fake gagging becomes real gagging, and Normani and Dinah laugh loud enough to garner the attention of the other students, including Camila’s neighbor Lauren.

Camila’s neighbor Lauren who Camila is kind of not really but really, really into.

Sidenote: she’s actually pretty much in love with her, but don’t tell anybody.  Even though everybody knows.  Let her think they don’t.

“What’re you ladies laughing about?” Lauren inquires, falling into step with them.  Camila’s heart seizes inside of her with Lauren so close.  She’s lived across the girl for the better part of her life, and she has never grown used to quite how pretty she is.  She’s the girl next door in reality, but she doesn’t subscribe to the archetype; she’s mysterious, flirty, enticing; eyes that could surely burn holes into Camila’s own if she maintained eye contact for too long.  Even as a little kid her heart thudded faster in Lauren’s presence than out of it, and right now she thinks she might cough it up into her hands.  Which is a gross analogy, but.

“Mila is being a prude, that’s what.” Dinah huffs, smirking.  Being that they are her best friends, Dinah and Normani are no stranger to Camila’s bias towards Lauren (something she regrets letting them in on every time the four of them are in one room).

Lauren quirks a single bold eyebrow.  Camila melts, decides Dinah will be getting a talking-to real soon.  “Oh?” Lauren says, voice tinged with curiosity.  Her eyes flicker to the guide before back to Camila.  “Not your type?”

“Uh, not - not really.” Camila stammers out, licking her lips.  “I’m not really into the whole could-be-my-dad thing.”  Lauren chuckles low, eyelashes curving elegantly down when she looks to the floor.  Camila sends her gaze that way too and lets her tresses fall over her face, so that the pink blotches blossoming on her cheeks go unseen by Lauren.  She counts the tiles as they walk, avoiding parting lines with precisioned steps.

“There are over 32,000 known species of spider in the world.” the tour guide says, coming to a stopping point.  Camila ends up staggering and bumping into the boy in front of her, who turns momentarily to give her a dirty look.  She nearly audibly gulps.  “Here at Oscorp we have created our own genetically modified species of ‘super-spider,’ if you will.  They have the combined abilities that come from a variety of different spiders, including precognition, web-making, camouflage, and more.  Here” - he gestures to a glass cage, in which a multitude of spiders crawl about; he corners are decorated with intricate webs, from which dangle cocoons of prey.  Camila catches one spider feeding, fangs dug into a carcass.  A dissatisfied gurgle echoes in the back of her throat and she rethinks how hungry she was just a moment ago - “we have fifteen prototypes of our super-spiders for study.”

“Fourteen.” Lauren cuts in.  Everyone turns to her.

“Pardon?” the guide says, brow scrunched.

“There’s only fourteen in there.”  Lauren gestures to the cage, in which there is in fact only fourteen spiders.

“Oh.” the guide says, mouth overturned in a frown.  “That adds some excitement to my day, doesn’t it?”  He distributes a smile, but it strikes Camila more as a grimace.  “Do excuse me a moment.”  He nods to the teacher, says something to him in hushed tone, and goes off.  Mr. Cowell looks perturbed (but he always looks like that, honestly), facing his students as they look on expectantly.

“There’s a bit of a technicality.” he says, accent thick and disdain just as.  “Stay put.  Don’t touch anything.”  His speech is curt, but he gets his point across - no one makes a sudden move.

Lauren harrumphs, crossing her arms indignantly.  Camila latches her eyes back onto her, feeling as though she deserves some sort of award for resisting such temptation long enough, and asks, “What?”

“Pretty irresponsible to lose a mutant spider, don’t you think?” Lauren says.  “This is totally the setup to every bad horror/sci-fi movie, you’d think people would be more responsible.”

“Whatchu thinks gonna happen, Lo?” Dinah jokes.  “Think a giant spider’s gonna come barrelling through here and eat us?”  She makes a chomping motion with her teeth at Camila, who cannot help but squeak before fixating a glare onto Dinah, who smiles proudly as Normani laughs.  Lauren merely shrugs in Dinah’s general direction, resisting her own smile.

Camila thinks about how this very well could be the perfect superhero origin story.  She thinks about this when there’s a sudden tingle that turns to searing needles on the back of her hand as soon as Lauren turns her head away.  It doesn’t hurt at first, and then suddenly it’s the only thing she can feel, and she yells out before her lips can contain her screech.  Flinging her hand into her vision, she sees a spider go flying off of her, and that’s the last thing she sees before she topples down, a knocked-down skyscraper, to the floor.  Her vision ensconced in black clouds, the last thing she sees before she hits the ground is the spider going flying and Dinah, Normani, and Lauren’s faces staring in abject horror at her.  She thinks Lauren yells her name, but maybe she’s just dreaming.

She thinks about this when she wakes up in a hospital bed who knows how much later, a gauze wrapped tightly around her left hand and Normani, Dinah, and her family looking at her like she’s just been resurrected.

The doctor explains to her it was a spider bite (something Camila had sort of a hint about already) and Camila brandishes her hand in front of her face, splaying her fingers and curling them in and out.  She can’t see her wound, but for whatever reason the vein in her wrist is more prominent than before, bulging blue against her flesh.  “Whoa,” she says breathlessly, “Do you think this is, like, one of those superhero origin stories?  Am I gonna be, like, a human spider thing?”  The doctor’s eyebrows rise up before she chuckles, bemused.  She promises Camila things like that only happen in the movies, but Camila lets her imagination flow as she makes her hand into a fist and fake-punches Dinah, who she has now decided is her fake archnemesis.

Camila knows she’d make a pretty shit superhero, but she doesn’t think she’ll ever have to worry about that.

Fucking surprise.

The next couple of days are fine for her - “fine” meaning normal.  It’s that Monday morning when she goes back to school that is most definitely the strangest she’s had ever, because when she ambles into the bathroom, rubbing sleep from her eyes, she about shrieks at the reflection staring back at her.  Because, to be honest, it doesn’t look a thing like her.

Well, that isn’t true.  It does look like her, but some version of her she hasn’t yet become.  She looks like the after in a before/after combination of pictures used to advertise some sort of workout video, because where before her arms were just plain noodles like the rest of her body, she sees now the tight muscles rippling through them.  Her face as well is different, her jaw stronger and cheeks tighter.  Her eyes much more alive than before, the blemishes she’d rubbed at with cream the night before mysteriously gone, and she knows Proactiv acts fast but not that fast.  “Holy cow,” she utters aloud to no one but herself, flexing her arms to see if it’s real or imaginary, and, whoa.  It’s real.  She flexes and her muscles tighten, veins threatening to protrude from her flesh even.  She dares a glance at her belly, pulling her t-shirt up and whoa.  Abs.  Abs where once was fleshy nothing.  And she’s got a fast metabolism but.

“Karla!” her mother suddenly calls to her, a light tap against the bathroom door jarring Camila back to reality.  “You alright in there?”

“Yes, mama!” Camila replies in a lighthearted tone.  Her fingers run along the edge of her abdomen, feeling the bumps of her new muscles.  To herself, “Yeah, I’m alright.”

She goes back to school then, nothing more than a bandage on her hand and her new body going suspiciously unnoticed.  Her classmates take small interest in her injury, asking questions that last all of homeroom, and then she’s back to wallflower status.  Not that she minds - a huge bombardment of questions would not be preferred, though she does relish in the attention for a little while.  Celebrity is as enticing as it is fleeting, she supposes.

“Hey,” Lauren says to her when she sees her for the first time that morning, beanie adjusted on head just so that her black hair splays out much like a mermaid’s might, and Camila almost misses what she says next because she’s so fixated on her overflowing queerness.  “How you feeling?”

“Just peachy.” Camila says, waving her left hand in display.  Lauren chortles heartily.

“Looks pretty vicious.” Lauren jokes. “Think you’re gonna make it through today?”

“I just couldn’t miss a day of school, you know,” Camila says, beating at her chest with a left-handed fist, “I’m a trooper.”

“That you are.” Lauren laughs, before turning to face the front of the room, and beneath her bandaged fingers Camila can feel her quickening pulse.

She doesn’t see Lauren again until lunch, or Normani either.  (She does see Dinah in chemistry, who she’s still make-believing is her archnemesis, something she demonstrates by an overexaggerated monologue and forcing a piggyback from her best friend.  Dinah gracefully drops her when the teacher arrives.)  She sits beside Normani and Dinah with her tray of suspicious cafeteria meat, pineapple slices, and milk carton (balanced meal, courtesy of America’s public school education system), and only blushes a little when after immediately sitting down she gets a shoulder nudge from Normani, prompting her to look up and see Lauren strutting down the row of aisles (okay, not so much strutting as walking like a normal human being, but Camila’s imagination has a tendency of exaggerating) carrying her own version of cafeteria mystery.  Camila, in an attempt to appear nonchalant, reaches for her milk.  And spills it.  In Lauren’s pathway.

Christ.

It’s a sudden rush of motion after the fact.  Lauren’s heel finds the splatter of white before her eyes can, and her food and body both go flying.  Camila only realizes after the fact that she goes flying too, only realizes she’s done this after Lauren has fallen gently into the crook of her one arm, and her tray and all its content fallen precisely onto Camila’s free hand.  She lets go of the breath she’s held in her mouth, realizing she was holding that back too.

“Whoa,” Lauren says, eyes wide and grin taking up her cheeks before she can pretend she’s not amazed, “Catlike reflexes, huh?”

“Um” is what Camila replies with, unsure of what exactly just transpired, but definitely sure that she can feel her own blood about to burst through her skin from how hard it’s pumping through her body because she can feel the pulse of Lauren’s own blood flush against her.  It feels poetic; it feels like a sixth sense of some sort.  Or maybe it’s just creepy.

“Well then.” Lauren says as she moves to stand, Camila quickly relinquishing her and handing her tray over, surprised she isn’t causing it to vibrate because she’s sure she’s shaking.  “Thanks, Camz.”  Lauren departs then, goes to sit at her respective table with her friend Ally, and Camila’s mouth gets very, very dry.

She only sits down when Dinah snaps her to attention, blushing as she sits, and tugging on a loose strand of hair nervously as Dinah and Normani tease her.  She’s hyper-aware of every molecule making her up now - in fact, she’s hyper-aware of everything.  She’s tuned in to every motion in the cafeteria, every noise; she can hear conversations from across the way, can sense Lauren behind her shifting in her seat, can sense the in and outs of breathing from the boy two tables down.  Her left hand twitches.

“Stop acting so weird.” Normani says, jostling her from her reverie.  “We know you’re in love and everything, but you still have to stay in the world of the living.”

“Oh, ha ha.” Camila deadpans, chucking a pineapple slice at Normani and hitting her directly in the square of her forehead, which is pretty impressive considering her aim is normally quite poor.  Maybe these new reflexes can come in handy.

She thinks they just might after lunch, when the halls are still teeming with conversation and tomfoolery, and there is a loud crash Camila knows all too well as the crash of a body hitting a locker.  She whips her head round to see the resident bully shoving one of the boys from her Calc class, an evil smile playing on his lips.  A crowd forms around the two, aggressors chanting “fight! fight! fight!”  The three of them, Camila, Dinah, and Normani, stand with the crowd, but only out of curiosity, not for love of violence.

Camila detests violence, and it’s with a heavy heart she watches the way this boy is being treated.  Her fists clench in anger and tears prick her brown eyes as she watches.  He’s holding his hands high, repeating “I don’t wanna fight you, I don’t want any trouble” to no avail, and her heart sinks when she sees the bully raise his fist with a cackle sounding, right before he lets his hand fly.

And then magically she’s between them, holding the aggressive fist between her own.

Everyone is more than a little stunned.  Tiny Camila Cabello standing up to a beefy senior - and holding her own.  Dinah and Normani look half-shocked, half-proud, and wholly mortified; she catches Lauren in her periphery, mouth ajar in amazement; the bully looks too stunned to move.  And then he looks angry.

“Hey, I don’t hit girls, man.” he spits at her, yanking his fist from out of her grasp.  Camila can sense his heartbeat getting faster, and can sense the boy’s behind her abrupt shortness of breath.  

“Who said you have to hit anybody?” she spits right back at him, and there’s a collective wince that shivers through the crowd.  The boy in front of her licks his lips, swivels his head around to see what his companions are doing.  Everyone just looks on, and he’s nervous.  Really nervous.

“Out of my way.” he stammers then, pushing her out of the way and raising an open palm to smack the kid.  Faster than she thought she ever could, Camila grabs his hand and kicks the back of his knee in one swift motion.  He yelps, crashing to the ground on his tailbone, the small yelp then morphing into a cry of anguish.  There’s a hush of patience, of what’s-going-to-happen-next and i-can’t-believe-that-just-happened, before Camila is delivered a bounty of wolf whistles and applause from the bystanders engulfing her.  She doesn’t have a chance to take it all in before Normani’s hand is tight on her wrist, pulling her through the mess of people.  She doesn’t say anything, no scolding, no praising (that’s Dinah, following her with surprised whoops of pleasure), just gets her away before a faculty member can show up and misinterpret the scene of the crime.

It’s when they’re safely away that Normani spins around on her, eyes nearly bulging, and Camila looks back from her to Dinah in succession as they ask what the hell is up with her.

“I,” Camila says, staring down at her arms, admiring the lean muscle and questioning the ability that comes with them.  “I don’t know.”

They let the subject go - well, sort of.  They don’t ask her what’s wrong but Dinah will take any and every opportunity to brag about Camila and Camila will shush her ardently and Normani will shake her head.  Their individual behavior is nothing out of the ordinary, and Camila relishes the normalcy of all it, thinks maybe today is some sort of weird fluke and everything’s gonna go back to her happy-boring eternal state of mind.

She thinks about this when she wakes up in the middle of the night, feeling sticky and gross and dreading pulling the covers off to see why she feels sticky and gross.  She yanks the covers off anyway, though, and sees her hands coated in something white and messy, and she may not know much about the human anatomy, but she’s pretty sure this isn’t normal.

She almost screams, yells for her mother to come in and reassure she’s not dying of some crackpot disease, but instead she swallows that instinct and looks at her hands.  The white goo is secreting from underneath the bandage on her left hand, and even though the doctor told her not to, she removes the bandage - with difficulty; remember, the goo is really sticky and gross.  The bandage rips off her hand with an icky sound, and she sees that the long string of whatever is not coming from her hands so much as her wrists.

Frantically, she gets up, chanting a long string of  “ew, ew, ew” as she flicks her wrists in a desperate attempt to get the gunk off of her.  It whips across the room, sticking to whatever surface she flicks it onto, and even though it’s off her hands now a big glob of it has made a new home on the wall.

“Dammit.” she hisses, eyebrows knitting together in worry - her mom will kill her - as she crosses over to the wall.  With much hesitance, and a few attempts to reach for the glob that just result in her yanking her hand away, feeling the disgust swelling inside her, she presses her hand to it.  She tries to curl her fingers around it, to pull it off, but her flat palm stays stuck to the wall.  Camila decides this must be a horrible dream because that’s the only place where this stuff happens - the only time it’d happen in real life is if it happened to Camila.  Oh, wait, never mind then, now it makes sense.

“C’mon, no.” she whispers harshly as she presses another hand to the wall in an attempt to pull her other off, but instead they both end up stuck, palms flat and fingers slightly curled.  She presses two bare feet against the wall, but those stick to the wall as well.  Camila’s beginning to imagine what a life stuck to a wall would be like, because she doesn’t think she’ll ever get unstuck - maybe they’ll make a TLC special about her.  She just wishes she was wearing something cuter than her Gryffindor-themed pajamas that are falling off her hipbones in this position.  She tries effortlessly for what feels like years but is probably only minutes to peel herself off in one go, but all she ends up getting is the release of one hand from the wall with a sound that’s similar to tearing velcro.  Her palm comes away stinging for a second, her left hand, and she stares at the place where her spider bite used to be - she says used to because all traces of it are gone.  In fact, her skin looks healthier now than it did before the bite - she wonders what kind of moisturizer they must put in those bandages.

But then her mind flashes to the memory of the question she’d asked her doctor, the question that made the doctor laugh and treat her like a foolish child - she thinks about this as she eyes the wall, the ceiling, thinks about this as she forces her body to relax and carefully presses her palm higher up.  She feels the bumpy paint job stick to her skin seamlessly, and she bends her fingers so the tips meet with the paint; they stick just as easily.  Breathing far more shakily than she should be, she slowly peels her right hand from the wall and moves it up, repeating the same strange motion that somehow works.  She does the same with her feet, that now move fluently, as if she’s crawling on the ground and not a wall.  It takes no time at all for her to move naturally against the wall, to crawl with ease around and up, sticking to the ceiling, her hair the only part of her being dragged down by gravity.  The smile on her face is trapped in a limbo between disbelief and unbridled excitement, and she doesn’t even try to mask the frantic cackling that bursts forth from her.  This overconfidence, though, prompts her body to relax to the point where it detaches itself completely from its new perch, and she falls face-first into the covers of her bed, with the loudest of thumps causing the house to quake.  It doesn’t take long for her parents and Sofi to barge in, worry etched into their faces.  But then they see Camila’s mussy hair and the worry turns to annoyance.

“Camila, I thought we talked about jumping on the bed.” her mother says, voice laced with exhaustion.  Camila grins goofily.

“Sorry.” she says, but her heart is hammering.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Guys," she says quietly, "I've got something to tell you."

Her first instinct is to tell Dinah or Normani, but even as the tale rests on the tip of her tongue throughout every conversation the next day, she knows the rules of superhero-dom, and keeping powers a secret is one of them.  But, ugh, it’s so cool!  She doesn’t tell them anything, but the excitement is burning up her insides.  She’s read enough comics and seen enough movies to know this kind of stuff doesn’t happen by accident, that if she’s got these powers, she must be destined for something beyond her conviction.  She’s going to need a suit, an alias, supervillains - her stomach plummets to her shoes when she thinks about that.  Superheroes have to actually help people, they can’t just fly around the city and look really cool.  It’s not that Camila doesn’t like to help people, it’s that she’s not really that good at walking in a straight line so how can she expect to stop a bank robbery or an evil death ray or whatever superheroes do?

But she’s the one who has these powers, which must mean she can do it even if she doesn’t think she can, blah blah blah, it’s fate.  It’s fate that’s made her muscles tauter, her figure leaner, her abilities beyond the human.  That and a spider bite.

It’s not either one of those things, though, that’s going to make her an outfit, and so with a handful of Sharpies and a notebook she scribbles any design that pops into her head.  She plays with colors and doodles spiders, hand curled around the paper so no one can see, but everything she draws ends up looking dumb.  She can’t quite grasp a design that’s equal parts practical and fashionable, not to mention affordable.  It takes some arguing with herself before she’s ready to relinquish the idea of a cape, because Camila personally thinks the cape would be a nice, if not sensible, touch.

She scours her closet when she cannot think of a design, and finds only polka-dotted things and bows that will most certainly not strike fear into the hearts of evildoers.  The only thing that’s not cutesy is her red sweatshirt but it’s bulky and smells like she hasn’t washed it in awhile.  Because, let’s be honest, she probably hasn’t.

She pulls the sweatshirt from her closet anyway, sniffs it, and pulls back immediately, pulling her face into a disgusted expression.  Yuck, she thinks to herself, lifting her head to meet the window, and then her heart plummets to the bottom of her shoes because does she have the perfect view of the Jauregui house or what.

She doesn’t want to be a creeper, and she doesn’t try to be - she can’t help it that whatever architects built her house and the house next door decided to make it so the windows were right across from each other.  She can’t help it that Lauren’s bedroom is the one with the window right across from Camila’s, and she can’t help it that she’s kind of captivated by her.  Well, maybe that last one is a little her fault, but everything else clearly isn’t.

It’s not even that Lauren’s doing anything exquisitely entertaining - Camila can clearly see Lauren’s desk is positioned so she can look out the window, and she’s bent over what Camila assumes is her homework, with her hair hiding her face from Camila’s view.  There’s really nothing captivating about what’s going on, but Camila’s suddenly more alert, more aware.  It’s an aura that Lauren has, an effect on Camila that makes her bones quiver a little.  She entertains the thought that Lauren’s kind of her kryptonite and if some big bad guy wanted to defeat Camila - other than probably just pushing her and letting her fall over to her doom - he’d just have to present her with Lauren and she’d crumble.

It’s at this acute moment that Lauren decides to look at the window, and Camila knows the best way to save herself from embarrassment would be to duck but instead she stands still, eyes bugging out as they meet up with Lauren’s.  Thank god, Lauren doesn’t seem perturbed; instead she smiles and waves, and Camila’s insides burst into fireworks as she does a small wave in return.

She might have bigger problems than an archnemesis waiting to bash her face in.

Camila decides the sweatshirt might be her best bet, and she pairs it with blue yoga pants and a red ski mask.  All in all, she’s pretty terrifying to look at, but it’s a good first step.  Dinah and Normani wrinkle their noses in disgust the first time Camila wears it, when they’re out shopping for another girls’ night (she figured if they were going to traverse into the city, she may as well be ready for her shining debut as Spider-Girl, or whatever they’ll end up calling her).

“Do you not love yourself, Mila?” Dinah jokes, with a hint of genuine concern.  They’re crowded around the snack aisle in the gas station, and all their arms are already full of various chips and chocolatey things.

“What?  A girl can’t be comfortable?” Camila retorts, trying to quell the buzz and urge to just tell them, hey, I’m a superhero kind of!  That’s the sort of thing you usually tell your best friends, right next to crushes and food allergies.

“You can be comfortable without looking like a homeless orphan.” Normani says, to which Dinah cackles.  Camila is about to defend herself when there’s a loud banging noise of the gas station door being thrown open and slamming into the wall.  A man clad in black clothes brandishes a gun at the cashier, and Dinah, Normani, and Camila all fearfully fall back behind the displays to hide themselves.  Camila makes a startled noise before Normani covers her mouth with her hand.  The cashier empties the cash register and the man takes the money, just in the most cliched way a thief would, but that doesn’t make it any less terrifying to see.  He runs out, and immediately after he does the cashier rings the police.  Camila’s heartbeat is exploding in her throat when she realizes this may very well be a moment given to her by God, an opportunity for her to do what the spider built her for.  She is completely conflicted, because Dinah and Normani obviously want to get the hell out of the gas station and to Camila’s house before they all die, but she decides for once to act spontaneously.

She books it.

She hears them calling after her in disbelief as she sprints into the night.  She sees the thief all the way down the sidewalk, running frantically as sirens from the other way blare into the dark night.  Camila takes a deep breath, dons her mask, and runs after him.  He’s fast, but with these powers she’s faster, and she’s close to him in no time at all.  He runs into a warehouse, a building that looks abandoned and disheveled and definitely like the kind of building girls like Camila go into but don’t come out of.  Nevertheless, she follows him inside, chasing him up into the uppermost floor.  Usually she’d be about ready to die by now, her breaths coming in gasps, but right now she’s all adrenaline.

He’s still running faster than her, way too ahead of her to even realize she’s there, so she whips out her wrists and out shoots her web, which carries her right to the ceiling.  She sits there perched above him as he dawdles about the floor, seeming to think he’s alone.  He holds his gun to his side, but the police sirens are blaring loud enough that he’s still visibly on edge.  He offers a low laugh when Camila decides to get cocky.  She clears her throat.

“Who’s there?”  He whips around, frantic, gun back at the ready.

“Only the same dummy who’s been following you for seven-ish blocks.” she says, and feels a cruel twinge of delight at the fright in his face.  “You’re not very attentive, are you?”

“You better fucking show yourself, whoever the fuck you are!”

“Maybe if you ask me nicely next time.”  Camila lowers herself quietly behind him, and notices how he trembles. She probably shouldn’t feel this delighted at someone’s fear, but there is such a thrill rumbling in the pit of her belly.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asks in a harsh whisper, and Camila clears her throat again.  When he turns to her this time, she shoots webbing out at his hand, sending his gun flying out of it and pinning him helplessly to the wall (which at this point is more like a stack of bricks waiting to give in).  She shoots again, pinning his other hand and his eyes bug out from his dirty face.  She approaches him, and rips her mask off (not to be dramatic, but because it’s hot and her hair is in the way...but also yeah, she thinks it’s a pretty cool move too).

“The name’s Spider-Girl.” she says, then adds: “Bitch.”

He looks terrified, and the way his eyes bulge remind Camila that she’s seen him before: at Dinah’s house the other day, the news had been on (why, she couldn’t remember) and his face was plastered across the screen.  Arson.  Murder.  Escape from prison.  Some big bad ones tacked onto his profile, and Camila remembered thinking to herself god, I hope I never meet him.

“I know you.” she whispers, and he looks like he’s about to piss his pants.

“Please...please…”  Camila’s heart breaks a little for him; he’s unarmed now, and she can hear the police right below them.  She knows if she lets him go, she can just take him down to them, and everything can all be peachy.  She thinks.

She rips the webbing off of his hands, and he stands there a moment, not knowing what to do.  “Come along,” she says, reaching for him and expecting him to comply, when instead he lunges for her, her wrist in his meaty hand.  She tries to wrench free as he tries to attack her, but when she pulls back, she feels the shattering of glass.  They’ve shoved themselves into a window from the top floor.

He lets her go, screaming, and she panics but instinctively shoots her webbing out in a hopeless hope something will save her.  Her webbing grabs onto the top of an adjacent building, and with all her strength she swings herself up.  Suddenly she’s flying, so high above everything that her stomach just about falls out of her.  She flings herself atop a building, hits the roof and goes rolling, but only a few bruises as evidence remain when she brushes herself off.  When she catches her breath, she drags herself to the edge of the roof.  The man’s body lays in a dumpster’s trash heap as the police cars line up and cops approach him.  He’s not moving.  Camila’s stomach rolls over inside of her.

“Oh, my god.” she whispers to herself.  Suddenly, everything is too real.

Dinah and Normani are standing amongst a crowd, frantic when they lay eyes on her.  They look mad and scared, but mostly scared, which Camila is thankful for in this specific moment.

“I don’t normally take the Lord’s name in vain, but Jesus fucking Christ!” Normani cries, her and Dinah both enveloping her in a bone-crushing hug.

“Why is your face so dirty?” Dinah asks her, and Camila wrenches free a hand to rub at her cheek.  Black dirt comes away on her fingers.  She sighs, chest feeling heavier than it ever has before.

“Guys,” she says quietly, “I’ve got something to tell you.”

She tells them at girls’ night, and where at first they don’t seem to want to believe her, they admit there’s no other justified reason why she would chase after a seemingly hardened criminal - and be able to catch up to him no less.  She even demonstrates her sticky power for them in the form of crawling up her bedroom wall, and Normani looks as horrified as Dinah looks delighted.  It takes some getting used to, but they’re her best friends and they’ve seen her through weirder.

Okay, not much up to this point has been weirder than Camila’s ability to stick to things, but it’s an expression.  Get over it.

What’s really weird is how, about a week or so after the incident, the newspapers are aflutter with curiosity over the mysterious being who fled the scene of the crime.  Evidence on the body revealed a sticky weblike secretion, and enough witnesses were there to agree there was definitely a suspicious being doing what looked like soaring into the air and away.  Speculation has been rampant, until the newspapers decide to decide what that being was was no ordinary individual, but a superhuman.  Nicknames are thrown around in every paper until the one that sticks screams from the headline of one newspaper: Spider-Man.

Camila’s nose wrinkles the first time she hears it, and doesn’t really stop wrinkling after it sticks.  Not to be too social justice-y, but the immediate implication that this hero is male seems a bit unfair, both to the general population and to Camila’s self-esteem.  She openly complains about this in Normani’s bedroom one night, with newspapers spread out on the bedspread and various articles in a cluster of tabs on Normani’s laptop.

“It’s still pretty cool.” Dinah contests, “I mean, you’re a freakin’ superhero!”

“But I’m not a boy superhero.” Camila harrumphs. “I guess feminism really is dead.”  Dinah groans as her eyes roll so far back in her head it’s almost a surprise they don’t get stuck.

“No matter your gender,” Normani says, “your superhero costume is completely ratchet.”

Camila opens her mouth in protest, but honestly, it is.  It is totally improper of her to hold a prestigious title like Spider-Man (as incorrect as it would be) while looking like a homeless teenage boy.

It takes a few days, and then Normani finagles a way to get her grandma to sew together a suit for Camila.  Camila doesn’t know how she does it, just knows Normani makes something up about getting a jumpstart on Halloween amidst her request for a new dress, and soon enough her grandmother has created perhaps the sickest outfit Camila has ever worn.  She tests it out in Normani’s house, and is quite honestly amazed when she looks in the mirror.  The suit is tight and taut against her skin, and her new muscles are rippling from beneath the red-blue combination exterior.  The dark black spider emblazoned on her chest has thin long legs that stretch across her breasts, down to her belly, and up to her shoulders.  Every inch of her is covered in this skin-tight suit, and in her hand she holds a full-face mask equipped with killer and creepy eyes that hide her face.  In this mirror, with her back arched, chest puffed out, and every muscle and contour of her body outlined, she looks...kind of hot.  No, like really hot.  Like girl-next-door-might-look-at-her-twice hot.  Maybe.

But that’s not what’s important here.

She’s got a city to save.

Save might be overdramatic.  More like keep in check.  Or, not burn down in an effort to help it not burn down.

It takes her awhile to really get the hang of it, the whole out-on-the-town savior thing.  She wears the suit under her clothes at first before it starts getting really irritating, then resorts to just carrying it with her in a raggedy knapsack.  Her escapades start small, usually restricted to the simple gas station robbery, but as her popularity grows so do her deeds.  She’s saving people from burning buildings and suicidal individuals from the rooftop; she becomes more notorious as she does this, and soon Spider-Man, as her moniker officially is, is a local icon.  School brings her boys in T-shirts imitating “his” actions and girls with dreamy looks in their eyes as they discuss what “he” might look like under that mask, and it’s all Camila can do not to crush their dreams.

She spends most of her time, that’s not actually saving people that is, wondering what Lauren Jauregui thinks of all this.  If she thinks Spider-Man is as cool as everyone gushes about, or if she’s one of those eclectic types who feels like Spider-Man is nothing more than another product of consumerist America, or something equally as hipster and ridiculous.  She gets her answer when she so unsubtly crashes into Lauren in the hallway while her mind is occupied with thoughts about Lauren (you’d think her spider sense would translate into a hyper-awareness about the pretty next door neighbor’s sudden proximity, but alas), and sends Lauren’s books flying.

“Oh, geez, I’m so sorry!” Camila practically yells, blushing furiously as she dives down to pick up Lauren’s stuff before her own.

“It’s fine, it’s alright.” Lauren assures her in monotone as Camila hands her her things, though much more disheveled and disorganized now in her arms.  Lauren looks perturbed, and Camila knows her face has to be bright pink and completely giving away everything she’s thinking.

“Seriously, I am so sorry,” Camila rushes, tongue swelling and drying up as she panics in Lauren’s presence.  Lauren is not only the prettiest but the smartest girl Camila’s ever known; she tutored her in biology a couple years back, as well as virtually the entire rest of the class, and she’s the only reason Camila passed any science at all.  Lauren is really smart, and if Camila could trade brains with anyone it’d be her, though she’d much rather pick Lauren’s brain for all her worldly wisdom than put it in her own head.

But she’s getting sidetracked.

It’s then she notices a newspaper haphazardly poking out from between a pair of Lauren’s AP Lit novels, a newspaper with a headline that practically shouts for Camila to pay attention, and when her eyes drift to it she thinks this is her opportunity.

“Can’t go anywhere without hearing about this guy, huh?” she says, gesturing to the paper when Lauren’s brow furrows in confusion, but then her eyes light up when she realizes.

“Oh, yeah,” Lauren says, “I’m actually really fascinated by the whole thing.”

“Really?” Camila asks, trying not to show off the excited buzzing her body must be doing. “How so?”

“It’s so mysterious, y’know?” Lauren says.  “Some guy with obvious scientific talent - I mean, there’s no such thing as superpowers, so he’s gotta have some contraptions up his sleeve - goes around the city disguised and, like, fights crime?  I mean, he’s a regular superhero.  It’s interesting.”

“So you’re a fan of this Spider-Man?” Camila nudges.

Lauren purses her lips before answering.  “I don’t know.  I’m fascinated by him, but I’ll have to get back to you on if I like him.”  A beat.  “Maybe I can tell you when I figure it out, if you want my number.”

And, okay, so Camila has kind of been face-to-face with several hardened criminals over the past couple of months, but this is the moment that stops her heart.

“Uh” is Camila’s dignified response, and Lauren stares with quirked eyebrow before chuckling to herself and moving so her bare arm is facing Camila.

“Just write your number down here, and I might text you sometime.”  Camila starts to try to blather something intelligible out, then realizes she shouldn’t and can’t anyway, so she uncaps a pen she finds in her pocket after some desperate fumbling, carefully scribbles it onto Lauren’s skin (“carefully” meaning slowly, so she can realize the warmth of Lauren’s pumping blood under her fingertips), and then Lauren smirks and leaves her be.

Camila feels her mouth slowly going dry, and wonders how she ever managed to stop a bank robbery when one girl aged eighteen makes her falter just because her gaze is from Planet Green Eyes Attack You.  Who knows, maybe she’s nothing more than an alien sent down from such a planet to wreak havoc on earth and destroy the earthly hero the universe has been gabbing about all these light years.

Camila has an active imagination.

**Author's Note:**

> My tumblr is malikjaureguis, feel free to tell me what you think and stuff :) Thank you for reading it all through!


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